Vincent Barré, Forms of Humanism

Karen Wilkin

May 27, 2014 saw the official inauguration of “La Journée de la Résistance” – Resistance Day – in France. The newly established holiday honors the heroism of those individuals, celebrated and anonymous, who, in the words of a speaker at the dedication ceremony, “chose liberty over barbarism,” during the World War II Nazi occupation of France. Some time earlier, a competition was held for a sculpture celebrating those brave men and women, some of them young teen-agers during those terrible years. The winning work, Colonne des Rameaux – “Column of Branches” – by Vincent Barré, was unveiled at the May 27th event. Permanently installed in the lobby of the Jacques Chaban-Delmas building of the Assemblée Nationale and visible from the rue de l’Université, Barré’s elegant, restrained eight foot tower provides Paris with a nuanced, poetic public monument, at once compelling and intimate, layered with complex meanings. The artist says he wished to render homage to everyone who took part in the Resistance, to the people who acted, he says, “with perception and courage, with great moral force.” Only an abstraction was equal to this self-imposed task. Barré has succeeded admirably, giving a richly metaphorical, abstract face to those who, in his words, “knew how to say no at a serious moment in our history. No to the moral and political weakness of France, no to totalitarianism and servitude to Nazi-ism.”

Set near a wall inscribed with the names of the 1038 Compagnons de la Libération – a group of specially recognized participants – Colonne de Rameaux is, essentially, a circular “cage” constructed out of stacked rings of branches, cast in bronze from real specimens gathered by the artist from the countryside and subtly altered. The resulting openwork structure, declaratively singular but clearly made of many separate elements, retains a powerful sense of the hand. From a distance, the sculpture appears to be delicate and invites close inspection, yet for all the apparent fragility of the branches from which it is built, their sheer multiplicity also carries with it the implication of strength through unity. Imposing but still human in scale, the vertical, open volume is vaguely anthropomorphic, becoming, as we study it, a confrontational sentinel. This human resonance is an important part of the sculpture’s meaning. As was frequently noted during the dedication ceremony, the story of the French Resistance is a familial one that touches countless people. Barré’s own history is typical. Born in 1948, in Vierzon, and raised in Paris, after the end of the war, he had no direct experience of the period, yet the movement is not remote from him. His father and uncle were active in the Resistance, and to expand the connection, his long-time gallerist’s father’s name is inscribed among the Compagnons.

Yet Colonne des Rameaux provokes many other relevant associations beyond its overtones of human presence. The open “cage” structure of the column, for example, has overtones of both imprisonment and release. The irregular branch-like forms suggest rough growth, perhaps the maquis, itself – the scrubby wasteland that became synonymous with the activities of the Resistance fighters hiding there. The leaf-less branches can be read as emblematic of winter – “the long winter endured by France, Europe, and the world,” Barré says – but they also carry with them the hopeful promise of an inevitable spring. And to reinforce the importance of refusal – the saying “no” that was so crucial to Barré’s conception of the work – there is inscribed on a horizontal ring, at eye level, so that we discover it when we approach, a quotation from the poet René Char: “L’acquiescement éclair le visage, le refus lui donne la beauté” – “Aquiescence illuminates the face, refusal gives it beauty.”

Colonne des Rameaux was not Barré’s first monument honoring Resistance fighters. In 2002, he, along with the architect and designer Sylvain Dubuisson, with whom he has collaborated for many years, completed an installation on the outskirts of the town of Amilly, south of Paris, a few kilometers from the former farm where Barré has his main studio. Erected on the site where four young members of the movement, most of them local boys, were captured and later executed by the Germans, the work abstracts the tragedy into four hollow steel columns, larger than life but still evocative of the human figure. Each column is opened on one side with a vertical slot The slots are too narrow to enter, yet they turn the columns into emblems of secret but inaccessible places of refuge, an apt metaphor for both the young men’s clandestine Resistance activities and their inability to escape their enemies. Placed in a grassy field by a river, three columns are grouped fairly close together; the fourth, closer to the riverbank where one of the young men was killed as he tried to flee, extends the narrative. At the edge of the field, a low stone “bench” with inscribed quotations, including a line from the poem Psalm, by Paul Celan, in French and the original German, along with

pertinent facts, completes the ensemble. Like Colonne des Rameaux, the Amilly monument is at once reticent, highly suggestive, hieratic, and open-ended in its allusions.

These are terms that could be applied to just about all of Barré’s work, since the early 1980s, when he abandoned a promising practice as an architect – the profession of many of his family members for several generations – and began definitively to concentrate on sculpture. (He is, however, still active in projects that involve architectural elements and, because of his training, extremely sensitive to the relation of his sculptures to their settings.) The multiple associations that Barré’s sculpture provokes reflect his own wide-ranging enthusiasms. He is deeply knowledgeable about a broad cross-section of Western art and architecture, not surprisingly, since he has degrees in architecture and urbanism from several French institutions and pursued additional graduate studies with the legendary architect Louis Kahn, at the University of Pennsylvania. Barré is also notably widely travelled – he is fond of trekking through remote, sparsely populated Himalayan regions – and he is also deeply knowledgeable about the art and artifacts of the ancient past and of many cultures. The archaic and the utilitarian vernacular speak eloquently to him. As the notebooks that he has filled with ravishing drawings, over the years, attest, he is equally attentive to ancient sculptures from the Far East, devotional paintings from the early Renaissance in France, contemporary architecture and urban design, domestic objects from rural, non-industrialized regions, Romanesque sculpture and architecture, and more. His affection for all of these informs his work, inspiring forms, suggesting points of departure, and enriching his inventions and improvisations. The common factor among these apparently diverse sources is that they are all man-made. Barré sometimes draws the people he meets on his travels or the dramatic landscapes he often seeks out, but there’s no evidence of this kind of observation in his sculpture. While he occasionally takes as his starting point other works of art – or more accurately, his interest in particular aspects of other works of art – things made and used by human beings are the most crucial stimuli for both the formal conception and the scale of his work.

For the last fifteen years or so, for example, Barré’s small cast bronze sculptures seem to be responses to the fundamental character of humble utensils, useful objects, and expedient tools – functional things scaled to the hand and made by hand. While the intimate bronzes are resolutely abstract and ultimately resemble nothing but themselves, they trigger associations with everything from Chinese ritual bronzes to ancient Greek helmets to primitive cooking pots. It’s as if Barré distilled the most irreduceable elements of a wide range of utilitarian things scaled to the body and produced endless variations on their essential qualities. Some of these works are wall-hung, but others invite variable placements, a contingency that demands the action of the hand to manipulate the sculptures. The hand is similarly present when Barré works in two dimensions. His large, silhouette-like drawings, done directly on the wall or on paper, bear witness to repeated, rhythmic gestures that transfer pigment to the surface. This need for evidence of human intervention in the form of touch may echo Barré’s long interest in ceramics. From his first forays into sculpture until the present, he has periodically worked with clay, a notably tactile medium. Yet he approaches clay in surprising ways, assembling forms that reflect modernist notions of sculpture as construction, even though they retain a memory of traditional methods of forming useful vessels.

Man-made precedents reverberate in Barré’s work, animating and humanizing even his largest, most unequivocally abstract efforts. Such works are further enlivened by the tension between the opposing conceptions of sculpture as a singular monolith and as an assembly of discrete parts. Construction and carving play almost equal roles. While Barré’s small bronzes are clearly the result of handling relatively thin, planar materials and shaping them by folding, rolling, slicing, and reattaching, many of his large sculptures, made of cast iron, begin as direct carving from polystyrene blocks. (A series of massive vertical columns had their origins in the trunks of old, fallen trees.) In his large works, Barré has developed a vocabulary of robust forms, some ovoid and tapering, some hollow and conical, some rectangular and arching, like roof tiles. The members of this family of forms differ slightly with each iteration but are always distinguished by their “imperfect,” subtly inflected geometry. Openings of different shapes and sizes in the ends of the forms, now large and oval, now small and round, warp them, by virtue of their varying dimensions. The openings also force us to consider the interiors of the sculptures, reminding us that these sturdy volumes are not solid and contradicting the sense of bulk provoked by our awareness of their size and the sheer mass of the reddish iron from which they are cast. Unlike the vertical Colonne des Rameaux or the four “figures” of the Amilly monument, Barré usually presents these substantial elements on the ground, overlapping some, offering others singularly, scattering still others in variable groupings that respond to the particulars of the setting. Weighty forms, it seems, demand horizontal orientation, just as the disembodied shapes of his large drawings, which often conflate figure and ground, demand vertical orientation, often on visibly fragile, albeit large sheets of paper.

During the summer and fall of 2014, overlapping with the dedication of Colonne des Rameaux, other aspects of Barré’s work were revealed by two additional installations, commissioned for the annual “Arts and Nature” exhibition in the historic park and outbuildings of the Renaissance Château Chaumont-sur-Loire. In the park itself, Chaos, a casually disposed gathering of six open, tapering, cast iron forms, stretched across a grassy space framed by tall trees, with a view of the Loire, far below, and beyond that, distant fields and low hills. The generous size and delicately striated surface of each element turned the ensemble into an evocation of the tumbled column drums some early Greek temple. Yet the placement of the massive forms between the embracing trees also triggered unexpected but powerful recollections of those ultimate images of pastoral geometry: Paul Cézanne’s late, large masterworks of nude bathers out of doors, particularly the version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That, it turns out, was not happenstance. Barré was conscious of the site’s associations when he chose to place his works there, saying the Philadelphia bathers was a work he got to know well and admire greatly, when he was studying at the University of Pennsylvania, and that the spacing of the elements of Chaos between the tall, bracketing trees was deliberately calculated to suggest a connection. Like the columns of the Amilly monument, the solemn, seductive Chaos seems at once to refer to the architectural and to the presentness of human form.

Barré’s second work in “Arts and Nature,” Couronne — Crown – was installed in the elegant 19th century stables. Inspired by the crown of thorns in a glorious Pietá by the Renaissance master Jean Fouquet – his most important painting, installed in a modest church in a nearby town – Barré constructed a large ring of branches, thickened and altered them in places, cast them in bronze, and suspended this alluring, slightly threatening “crown” in an arched, brick-walled space above a circle of charcoal, spread beneath it. The meticulous adjustment of the size of both the suspended ring and the ominous expanse of charcoal to the proportions of the setting brought the entire space alive, creating a conversation between nature – the branches and the wood burned to create the charcoal – and construction – the brick vault. A clock on the wall above Barré’s spiky ring emphasized the notion of the passage of time, an idea reinforced, in the next bay, by an accompanying video that conflated images of the Fouquet Pietá and a Buddhist farmer, repeated with a varying sound track. Couronne and its related video, with their multiple allusions to the history of art, to Western religion and Eastern spirituality, to the past and the present, reveal a lot about their maker and his passions. But ultimately, what matters most is that Couronne is potent in purely visual, spatial terms. Like Chaos and Couronne de Rameaux, Couronne fascinates us with its solemn, economical forms, forms that allow (or force) each of us to discover a host of personal associations. But in the end, what makes Barré’s recent work so compelling are the wordless qualities of mass and surface, the shape and relationship of individual parts, the way that those parts embrace space and activate their setting, and the character of their materials. Anything else is a bonus.

Karen Wilkin

New York, June-July 2014

Vincent Barré, Forms of Humanism

Karen Wilkin

May 27, 2014 saw the official inauguration of “La Journée de la Résistance” – Resistance Day – in France. The newly established holiday honors the heroism of those individuals, celebrated and anonymous, who, in the words of a speaker at the dedication ceremony, “chose liberty over barbarism,” during the World War II Nazi occupation of France. Some time earlier, a competition was held for a sculpture celebrating those brave men and women, some of them young teen-agers during those terrible years. The winning work, Colonne des Rameaux – “Column of Branches” – by Vincent Barré, was unveiled at the May 27th event. Permanently installed in the lobby of the Jacques Chaban-Delmas building of the Assemblée Nationale and visible from the rue de l’Université, Barré’s elegant, restrained eight foot tower provides Paris with a nuanced, poetic public monument, at once compelling and intimate, layered with complex meanings. The artist says he wished to render homage to everyone who took part in the Resistance, to the people who acted, he says, “with perception and courage, with great moral force.” Only an abstraction was equal to this self-imposed task. Barré has succeeded admirably, giving a richly metaphorical, abstract face to those who, in his words, “knew how to say no at a serious moment in our history. No to the moral and political weakness of France, no to totalitarianism and servitude to Nazi-ism.”

Set near a wall inscribed with the names of the 1038 Compagnons de la Libération – a group of specially recognized participants – Colonne de Rameaux is, essentially, a circular “cage” constructed out of stacked rings of branches, cast in bronze from real specimens gathered by the artist from the countryside and subtly altered. The resulting openwork structure, declaratively singular but clearly made of many separate elements, retains a powerful sense of the hand. From a distance, the sculpture appears to be delicate and invites close inspection, yet for all the apparent fragility of the branches from which it is built, their sheer multiplicity also carries with it the implication of strength through unity. Imposing but still human in scale, the vertical, open volume is vaguely anthropomorphic, becoming, as we study it, a confrontational sentinel. This human resonance is an important part of the sculpture’s meaning. As was frequently noted during the dedication ceremony, the story of the French Resistance is a familial one that touches countless people. Barré’s own history is typical. Born in 1948, in Vierzon, and raised in Paris, after the end of the war, he had no direct experience of the period, yet the movement is not remote from him. His father and uncle were active in the Resistance, and to expand the connection, his long-time gallerist’s father’s name is inscribed among the Compagnons.

Yet Colonne des Rameaux provokes many other relevant associations beyond its overtones of human presence. The open “cage” structure of the column, for example, has overtones of both imprisonment and release. The irregular branch-like forms suggest rough growth, perhaps the maquis, itself – the scrubby wasteland that became synonymous with the activities of the Resistance fighters hiding there. The leaf-less branches can be read as emblematic of winter – “the long winter endured by France, Europe, and the world,” Barré says – but they also carry with them the hopeful promise of an inevitable spring. And to reinforce the importance of refusal – the saying “no” that was so crucial to Barré’s conception of the work – there is inscribed on a horizontal ring, at eye level, so that we discover it when we approach, a quotation from the poet René Char: “L’acquiescement éclair le visage, le refus lui donne la beauté” – “Aquiescence illuminates the face, refusal gives it beauty.”

Colonne des Rameaux was not Barré’s first monument honoring Resistance fighters. In 2002, he, along with the architect and designer Sylvain Dubuisson, with whom he has collaborated for many years, completed an installation on the outskirts of the town of Amilly, south of Paris, a few kilometers from the former farm where Barré has his main studio. Erected on the site where four young members of the movement, most of them local boys, were captured and later executed by the Germans, the work abstracts the tragedy into four hollow steel columns, larger than life but still evocative of the human figure. Each column is opened on one side with a vertical slot The slots are too narrow to enter, yet they turn the columns into emblems of secret but inaccessible places of refuge, an apt metaphor for both the young men’s clandestine Resistance activities and their inability to escape their enemies. Placed in a grassy field by a river, three columns are grouped fairly close together; the fourth, closer to the riverbank where one of the young men was killed as he tried to flee, extends the narrative. At the edge of the field, a low stone “bench” with inscribed quotations, including a line from the poem Psalm, by Paul Celan, in French and the original German, along with

pertinent facts, completes the ensemble. Like Colonne des Rameaux, the Amilly monument is at once reticent, highly suggestive, hieratic, and open-ended in its allusions.

These are terms that could be applied to just about all of Barré’s work, since the early 1980s, when he abandoned a promising practice as an architect – the profession of many of his family members for several generations – and began definitively to concentrate on sculpture. (He is, however, still active in projects that involve architectural elements and, because of his training, extremely sensitive to the relation of his sculptures to their settings.) The multiple associations that Barré’s sculpture provokes reflect his own wide-ranging enthusiasms. He is deeply knowledgeable about a broad cross-section of Western art and architecture, not surprisingly, since he has degrees in architecture and urbanism from several French institutions and pursued additional graduate studies with the legendary architect Louis Kahn, at the University of Pennsylvania. Barré is also notably widely travelled – he is fond of trekking through remote, sparsely populated Himalayan regions – and he is also deeply knowledgeable about the art and artifacts of the ancient past and of many cultures. The archaic and the utilitarian vernacular speak eloquently to him. As the notebooks that he has filled with ravishing drawings, over the years, attest, he is equally attentive to ancient sculptures from the Far East, devotional paintings from the early Renaissance in France, contemporary architecture and urban design, domestic objects from rural, non-industrialized regions, Romanesque sculpture and architecture, and more. His affection for all of these informs his work, inspiring forms, suggesting points of departure, and enriching his inventions and improvisations. The common factor among these apparently diverse sources is that they are all man-made. Barré sometimes draws the people he meets on his travels or the dramatic landscapes he often seeks out, but there’s no evidence of this kind of observation in his sculpture. While he occasionally takes as his starting point other works of art – or more accurately, his interest in particular aspects of other works of art – things made and used by human beings are the most crucial stimuli for both the formal conception and the scale of his work.

For the last fifteen years or so, for example, Barré’s small cast bronze sculptures seem to be responses to the fundamental character of humble utensils, useful objects, and expedient tools – functional things scaled to the hand and made by hand. While the intimate bronzes are resolutely abstract and ultimately resemble nothing but themselves, they trigger associations with everything from Chinese ritual bronzes to ancient Greek helmets to primitive cooking pots. It’s as if Barré distilled the most irreduceable elements of a wide range of utilitarian things scaled to the body and produced endless variations on their essential qualities. Some of these works are wall-hung, but others invite variable placements, a contingency that demands the action of the hand to manipulate the sculptures. The hand is similarly present when Barré works in two dimensions. His large, silhouette-like drawings, done directly on the wall or on paper, bear witness to repeated, rhythmic gestures that transfer pigment to the surface. This need for evidence of human intervention in the form of touch may echo Barré’s long interest in ceramics. From his first forays into sculpture until the present, he has periodically worked with clay, a notably tactile medium. Yet he approaches clay in surprising ways, assembling forms that reflect modernist notions of sculpture as construction, even though they retain a memory of traditional methods of forming useful vessels.

Man-made precedents reverberate in Barré’s work, animating and humanizing even his largest, most unequivocally abstract efforts. Such works are further enlivened by the tension between the opposing conceptions of sculpture as a singular monolith and as an assembly of discrete parts. Construction and carving play almost equal roles. While Barré’s small bronzes are clearly the result of handling relatively thin, planar materials and shaping them by folding, rolling, slicing, and reattaching, many of his large sculptures, made of cast iron, begin as direct carving from polystyrene blocks. (A series of massive vertical columns had their origins in the trunks of old, fallen trees.) In his large works, Barré has developed a vocabulary of robust forms, some ovoid and tapering, some hollow and conical, some rectangular and arching, like roof tiles. The members of this family of forms differ slightly with each iteration but are always distinguished by their “imperfect,” subtly inflected geometry. Openings of different shapes and sizes in the ends of the forms, now large and oval, now small and round, warp them, by virtue of their varying dimensions. The openings also force us to consider the interiors of the sculptures, reminding us that these sturdy volumes are not solid and contradicting the sense of bulk provoked by our awareness of their size and the sheer mass of the reddish iron from which they are cast. Unlike the vertical Colonne des Rameaux or the four “figures” of the Amilly monument, Barré usually presents these substantial elements on the ground, overlapping some, offering others singularly, scattering still others in variable groupings that respond to the particulars of the setting. Weighty forms, it seems, demand horizontal orientation, just as the disembodied shapes of his large drawings, which often conflate figure and ground, demand vertical orientation, often on visibly fragile, albeit large sheets of paper.

During the summer and fall of 2014, overlapping with the dedication of Colonne des Rameaux, other aspects of Barré’s work were revealed by two additional installations, commissioned for the annual “Arts and Nature” exhibition in the historic park and outbuildings of the Renaissance Château Chaumont-sur-Loire. In the park itself, Chaos, a casually disposed gathering of six open, tapering, cast iron forms, stretched across a grassy space framed by tall trees, with a view of the Loire, far below, and beyond that, distant fields and low hills. The generous size and delicately striated surface of each element turned the ensemble into an evocation of the tumbled column drums some early Greek temple. Yet the placement of the massive forms between the embracing trees also triggered unexpected but powerful recollections of those ultimate images of pastoral geometry: Paul Cézanne’s late, large masterworks of nude bathers out of doors, particularly the version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That, it turns out, was not happenstance. Barré was conscious of the site’s associations when he chose to place his works there, saying the Philadelphia bathers was a work he got to know well and admire greatly, when he was studying at the University of Pennsylvania, and that the spacing of the elements of Chaos between the tall, bracketing trees was deliberately calculated to suggest a connection. Like the columns of the Amilly monument, the solemn, seductive Chaos seems at once to refer to the architectural and to the presentness of human form.

Barré’s second work in “Arts and Nature,” Couronne — Crown – was installed in the elegant 19th century stables. Inspired by the crown of thorns in a glorious Pietá by the Renaissance master Jean Fouquet – his most important painting, installed in a modest church in a nearby town – Barré constructed a large ring of branches, thickened and altered them in places, cast them in bronze, and suspended this alluring, slightly threatening “crown” in an arched, brick-walled space above a circle of charcoal, spread beneath it. The meticulous adjustment of the size of both the suspended ring and the ominous expanse of charcoal to the proportions of the setting brought the entire space alive, creating a conversation between nature – the branches and the wood burned to create the charcoal – and construction – the brick vault. A clock on the wall above Barré’s spiky ring emphasized the notion of the passage of time, an idea reinforced, in the next bay, by an accompanying video that conflated images of the Fouquet Pietá and a Buddhist farmer, repeated with a varying sound track. Couronne and its related video, with their multiple allusions to the history of art, to Western religion and Eastern spirituality, to the past and the present, reveal a lot about their maker and his passions. But ultimately, what matters most is that Couronne is potent in purely visual, spatial terms. Like Chaos and Couronne de Rameaux, Couronne fascinates us with its solemn, economical forms, forms that allow (or force) each of us to discover a host of personal associations. But in the end, what makes Barré’s recent work so compelling are the wordless qualities of mass and surface, the shape and relationship of individual parts, the way that those parts embrace space and activate their setting, and the character of their materials. Anything else is a bonus.